This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The following abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined as follows:    3GPP third generation partnership project    BW bandwidth    CINR carrier to interference and noise ratio    CQI channel quality indicator    CRS common reference signal    DL downlink    E-UTRA evolved universal terrestrial radio access    eNB or eNodeB evolved node B/base station in an E-UTRAN system    E-UTRAN evolved UTRAN (LTE)    FFR fractional frequency reuse    FSS frequency selective scheduler    FTP file transfer protocol    HARQ hybrid automatic repeat request    ICIC inter cell interference co-ordination    LTE long term evolution    LTE-A long term evolution advanced    MIMO multiple input multiple output    MMSE minimum MSE    MRC maximum ratio combining    MSE mean squared error    NGMN next generation mobile networks    PF proportional fair    QAM quadrature amplitude modulation    RAN radio access network    RB resource block    RRC radio resource controller    Rx receiver    RAT radio access technology    SB subband    TU typical urban    Tx transmitter    UE user equipment (e.g. mobile terminal)    UL uplink    UTRAN universal terrestrial radio access network    WB wideband    PCN power control normalized    PCLN power control log normalized
In LTE, downlink interference control is a major topic of interest and several schemes have been proposed to mitigate interference. These schemes are typically referred to as Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR)/Inter cell Interference Coordination (ICIC) schemes. They all essentially do some form of downlink power control. In these schemes a cell sets aside a portion of its bandwidth for being transmitted at a low power level (including zero power), so that neighboring cells can schedule their cell edge UEs in these portions to mitigate interference issues. The problem with these approaches is that they are ad-hoc static approaches where there is no information sharing between the cells that could potentially lead to better utilization of system resources (and/or optimization of a global utility metric).